Author Archives: Ida Torres

This Umbrella Is Actually a 500-Year-Old Korean Hat in Disguise

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Anyone who has seen K-Pop Demon Hunters or an episode of a Korean historical drama is familiar with what a gat is. Even if you don’t know what it’s actually called, it’s pretty recognizable: the black hat with its cylindrical crown and wide, dramatic brim that sometimes hides the eyes or even the entire face. It was traditionally worn by men of high social standing during the Joseon era, serving as a marker of Confucian values, refinement, and status. It’s rarely worn now unless someone is shooting a drama or attending some sort of costume party, though the gat did have a major pop culture moment thanks to Netflix’s Kingdom, where it became instantly iconic worldwide.

The National Museum of Korea called for designers to reimagine the gat for a modern setting. Design studio TOSO created the winning entry, the Gat Umbrella, which is exactly what it sounds like. This is part of the MU (the official merchandise brand of the National Museum Foundation of Korea) competition that invites designers to reinterpret historical objects into something that can actually be used in modern times. It’s a brilliant initiative that bridges Korea’s rich cultural heritage with contemporary everyday life.

Designer: TOSO

The Gat Umbrella looks like a regular umbrella when folded, but when opened, it looks like you’re standing under a huge gat, with the added bonus of an actual canopy to keep you dry. It’s around 33 inches long and has a width of 1,050 millimeters when opened. The canopy is made from PVC with a fiberglass-reinforced frame, its tip from polypropylene, and the handle from EVA material. The deep black canopy is a direct callback to the traditional color of the gat, and the proportions of the brim have been carefully scaled to capture that wide, commanding silhouette. When held up against a grey sky, you can almost picture the Joseon-era scholar it was inspired by.

Aside from being a status symbol, the original gat was also used to protect its wearer from the sun, rain, and wind, which makes this reimagining feel even more intentional. Anyone who has watched enough K-dramas knows those dramatic scenes where characters brave storms with a gat firmly in place, rain streaming off its wide brim. So this transformation of the headwear is still a clever nod to its origins. It’s just more modern looking and has the added protection of a proper canopy, since the elements now tend to be a lot more mercurial.

What makes the Gat Umbrella especially appealing is how it straddles the line between functional product and cultural artifact. It’s not just a novelty item you display on a shelf. It’s something you actually take out on a rainy Tuesday and suddenly feel like the most stylish person on the street. There’s something deeply satisfying about a design that takes centuries of history and makes it wearable (or in this case, holdable) in the most practical way possible. And given the global reach of Korean culture right now, something tells us this won’t stay a niche item for long.

It also arrives at a moment when the global appetite for Korean culture is at an all-time high. From K-dramas to K-pop to Korean food, the world is paying attention, and the Gat Umbrella is exactly the kind of conversation starter that lets people engage with that culture in a tangible, everyday way. It’s not just merchandise; it’s a story you carry with you. The kind of thing that makes strangers stop you in the street and ask where you got it.

Whether you’re a K-culture enthusiast, a design collector, or simply someone who appreciates carrying a piece of history through a rainstorm, this is the kind of purchase that feels both indulgent and meaningful. It’s proof that heritage doesn’t have to stay locked behind glass. Sometimes, the best way to honor the past is to take it out into the rain.

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The $195K Tiny Home That Finally Makes Sense for Families

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The tiny house movement has always been better at Instagram than at parenting. A couple, a dog, maybe a sourdough starter on the counter: that’s the fantasy it learned to sell. The moment a child enters the picture, the aesthetic dream quietly dissolves into a very real problem: where does anyone actually sleep, and who gets the bathroom first? Unplgd Tiny Homes, the Blue Mountains studio behind the original 26-foot Kookaburra, has spent the past year trying to answer that question seriously, and their answer is the Kookaburra 2.0.

The new model stretches to 8.5 metres long, 3 metres wide, and 4.5 metres at the gable (27.8 × 9.8 × 14.7 feet), adding just over half a metre to the original footprint but reorganising almost everything inside. Where the first Kookaburra was designed around two people working from home, the 2.0 reframes the interior around four distinct zones: cook, wash, store, and what the studio calls “reset after a big day.” That last phrase tells you exactly who this is for. Not minimalists chasing freedom, but parents chasing a moment of quiet.

Designer: Unplgd Tiny Homes

Structurally, the design’s smartest move is the dual-loft layout. A double-height void anchors the centre of the home, with the queen master loft at one end and a children’s single loft at the other, each reached by the same staircase-storage unit that doubles as the home’s main organisational spine. The queen loft offers standing headroom on three sides, which sounds like a minor detail until you’ve spent a morning in a traditional tiny house loft hunched over trying to find your socks. The kids’ loft sits separately, with its own clerestory window band that pulls in light while keeping privacy intact. On paper, the spatial hierarchy is genuinely considered.

The bathroom is getting a lot of attention, and for good reason. A full-size freestanding bathtub in a home under 28 feet is a confident choice, paired with an integrated laundry nook that treats domestic routine as a design problem worth solving. The L-shaped kitchen with breakfast bar follows the same logic. Outside, VJ panelling meets cream corrugated steel, a material palette that signals a specific aesthetic position in 2026 Australian residential design: not rough-hewn bush shack, not cold minimalist box, but something closer to considered coastal warmth.

AU$195,000 is the turnkey starting price, which puts it squarely in the range where comparisons to conventional housing become unavoidable. For roughly the same budget in regional New South Wales, you could find a small permanent house with a yard, without the towing and zoning complications that come with any road-legal tiny home. The 3-metre width is legal for towing across most Australian states without a wide-load permit, but regulations shift the moment you cross certain state borders, and the logistics follow. That’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s a real calculation that the breathless expo coverage tends to skip past.

It’s also worth naming the elephant in the room: no family has actually lived in this house yet. Every piece of coverage, including this one, is written from a display unit that toured the Hawkesbury Show circuit. The questions that matter most are the ones that can’t be answered from photos: whether noise transfers between lofts, whether the staircase is negotiable at 2am with a toddler, whether two adults and one child can share a morning bathroom without losing their minds. Unplgd deserves credit for thinking the brief through more carefully than most in this space, but the gap between a stunning expo build and a liveable family home is exactly the gap that gets papered over by beautiful photography.

One last thing worth flagging: search “Kookaburra tiny home” right now and you’ll pull up at least three different brands. Unplgd, Adapt Homes, and Kookaburra Tiny Homes AU are all trading under variations of the same bird name. They are completely unrelated companies. Do your research before you request a quote. The Kookaburra 2.0 is a genuinely promising design pushing against a real limitation in the tiny house category. Whether it delivers on the promise is a question only a family who actually lives in one can answer.

The post The $195K Tiny Home That Finally Makes Sense for Families first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Sunglasses Built for When You’re Actually in the Water

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Every summer, I do the same thing. I bring my sunglasses to the beach, spend twenty minutes deciding where to put them once I get in the water, and end up burying them in the sand next to my towel. Sometimes they’re there when I get back. Sometimes they’ve migrated. Sometimes I sit on them. It’s not a good system, and I’ve never really stopped to ask whether the problem is me or the design.

That’s why the Water Glasses project by Tbilisi-based XYZ Integrated Architecture stopped me mid-scroll. Not because it’s flashy or over-designed, but because it addresses something so obvious I can’t believe it’s taken this long. Most sunglasses are built for everything except the exact moments when you most need sun protection: poolside, at the beach, wading through a river. The second the water comes into the picture, the glasses come off, the case comes out (if you remembered to bring one), and suddenly your supposedly practical accessory becomes a liability.

Designer: XYZ Integrated Architecture

Water Glasses rethink the object from the ground up. The design strips everything back to two elements: lenses and a paracord. No frames, no hinges, no temples. The lenses are threaded onto the cord so they sit on the face when worn, drop below the chin when you don’t need them, and hang around the neck like a necklace the rest of the time. No case, no pocket, no towel burial. They stay with you.

It sounds almost too simple, and I think that’s the point. The studio, which typically operates in the realm of architecture, has been developing this project since 2019, and the refinement shows. The restraint feels deliberate rather than minimal for minimalism’s sake. They’ve essentially asked: what would sunglasses look like if they were designed specifically for the one environment where the existing design completely fails? The answer turns out to be lenses and a cord. That’s either obvious in retrospect or quietly radical, depending on how you look at it.

The collection comes in three configurations, with one, two, or three pairs of lenses strung along the cord. The multi-lens versions are where the project gets genuinely interesting. Worn as a necklace or draped across the body, they stop being sunglasses altogether and shift into the territory of wearable sculpture. The photography, shot at Tbilisi Olympic Pool, leans fully into this reading, and it works. The lenses come in vivid colors and irregular shapes, some softly circular, some almost organic with wavy, knotted edges, all of them laced with paracord in contrasting hues. They look like something you’d find at a contemporary jewellery fair as much as at an eyewear launch.

The lenses themselves are produced by Divel Italia, a specialty optics manufacturer, which grounds the project technically even when the visuals feel more like art than product. This matters because a design this stripped back lives or dies on the quality of its components. There’s no frame to absorb any imprecision.

I keep thinking about how much of what we own is really designed to be managed rather than used. A sunglass case is a perfect example of an object that exists purely to protect another object. We accept it as necessary without really questioning why. Water Glasses quietly make the case that a well-designed thing shouldn’t require its own support infrastructure. The cord is the case. The wearing is the storage.

The studio calls it a reexamination of the typology, which is accurate but slightly undersells how pleasantly disruptive the result feels. Conceptual eyewear projects come and go, and most stay safely in the realm of theory. These feel like they could actually sit on your face at a rooftop pool in July, which is the whole point.

Whether or not they move into full production, Water Glasses do what good design projects are supposed to do: they make you look at a familiar object and wonder why it was ever done any other way. That’s a harder thing to pull off than it looks.

The post The Sunglasses Built for When You’re Actually in the Water first appeared on Yanko Design.

Nobody Designed a Drum Kit for Beginners. Until Boxboom.

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Picking up the drums has always come with a quiet, frustrating tax. Before you’ve played a single beat, you’re already being asked to make a significant financial commitment, figure out where to put a massive piece of equipment, and accept that your neighbors might hate you. For most people, that’s where the dream ends. Not with failure, but with logistics.

Xiaoyu Yu, a graduate from the Umeå Institute of Design’s class of 2026, noticed this gap and did something about it. Her project, Boxboom, is a rental-based, foldable electronic drum kit designed specifically for first-time players. On paper, it sounds straightforward enough. In practice, it reframes the entire conversation about what a beginner drum experience should actually look like.

Designer: Xiaoyu Yu

The existing drum market is oddly shaped. At the entry level, you get cheap kits that feel nothing like playing real drums. At the high end, you get electronic kits that come closest to replicating acoustic feel, but they’re expensive, require serious space, and carry the weight of a long-term commitment for someone who isn’t even sure they like drumming yet. As Yu observed, the market offers little for true beginners. Boxboom identifies that gap clearly: the problem isn’t that beginners can’t learn, it’s that the tools were never really designed around them to begin with.

The physical design is worth appreciating on its own terms. Boxboom unfolds from a compact box into a fully functional drum configuration. Modular joints allow for quick setup and flexible arrangement, which means you’re not stuck with one rigid layout that doesn’t suit your body or your room. Parts are designed to be replaced individually, a detail that matters a lot for longevity. When a product is rentable, it has to survive multiple users, multiple moves, and the general roughness of being a learning tool. The design accounts for all of that without looking like it’s trying too hard.

What makes Boxboom more than just a folding drum kit is the service thinking built around it. Yu designed a three-sided ecosystem connecting users, rental shops, and drum training institutions through an online booking and delivery system. You’re not just renting a piece of hardware. You’re entering a structure that connects you to learning, not just to ownership. That shift matters more than it might seem. Ownership, it turns out, is one of the biggest barriers to entry, not a lack of enthusiasm.

The research behind the project is just as considered. Yu conducted field research at Umeå Music School and Toontrack, a leading drum sound engine company, to understand how beginners experience rhythm and what it genuinely takes for a kit to support early learning. The design process ran from 1:10 scale models all the way to full 1:1 prototypes, testing folding logic and setup sequences until the physical experience matched the idea. A central Hub integrates a phone holder, power panel, and teaching stick storage dock into a single arm. The whole system is organized around one driving question: how can a drum kit itself teach you to play?

That question is what separates Boxboom from the many beginner-focused products that quietly shrink their ambitions and rebrand it as accessibility. Yu isn’t simply lowering the financial barrier. She’s rethinking the relationship between a learner and their instrument entirely. Most musical tools are designed with the assumption that you already know what you’re doing. Boxboom assumes you don’t, and it respects you for exactly that.

Graduation design projects like this tend to get filed away a little too fast. They show up at exhibitions, earn some well-deserved attention, and then disappear before anyone asks whether they could actually become something real. Boxboom feels like it deserves a longer conversation than that. The drumming market hasn’t seen this kind of structural rethinking in a long time, and the problem it’s addressing is genuinely underserved.

Whether Boxboom ends up in production or remains a concept, it already does something worth noting: it makes you wonder why nobody asked these questions sooner. Drums have always been for everyone. The design just hadn’t caught up yet.

The post Nobody Designed a Drum Kit for Beginners. Until Boxboom. first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Hanoi House With 100 Windows and No Two the Same

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The name alone stops you. 100 Windows. Not “The Pavilion House” or “House No. 7” or something equally poetic and vague. Just a count. A blunt, almost confrontational declaration of exactly what you’re getting, and yet somehow, the moment you see it, the name feels like the most understated thing about it.

Designed by Hanoi-based architecture practice Inrestudio, this multi-generational home is wrapped in a terracotta-toned, double-layered exterior punctured by irregularly placed, mismatched openings. The windows aren’t uniform. They don’t line up in neat rows or follow a rational grid. They appear across the facade like a scatter of thoughts, some large, some small, some square, some elongated, placed with an intention that reveals itself slowly the longer you look. It’s controlled disorder, the kind that only happens when someone has thought very carefully about where chaos is allowed to go.

Designer: Inrestudio

The project sits within one of Vietnam’s most distinctive and genuinely challenging housing typologies: the tube house. These long, narrow urban homes are a product of Hanoi’s history, born from a time when property taxes were levied on street frontage, pushing families to build deep and vertical rather than wide. The tube house is, by nature, a compromise. You work with what the city gives you. What Inrestudio does here is refuse to let that constraint become a ceiling.

The double-layered envelope is the key move. By wrapping the home in two skins instead of one, the architects create what they call “in-between spaces,” zones that exist between the inner living areas and the outer facade. These aren’t wasted margins or dead air. They’re transitional, purposeful areas where the house breathes, where light filters and shifts through the day, where the rigid boundary between inside and outside softens into something more generous. It’s the kind of spatial thinking that doesn’t photograph easily but completely transforms the experience of actually being in a building.

This matters especially because 100 Windows was designed for multiple generations living under one roof, a reality that remains far more common in Vietnam than it does in most Western countries. Designing for multi-generational life is genuinely hard. You’re negotiating different rhythms, different needs for privacy and togetherness, different relationships to noise, light, and air. Architecture that understands this doesn’t just divide a floor plan into labeled rooms. It creates conditions where people can be near each other without being on top of each other, where the house itself does some of the social negotiating.

The terracotta tones feel right for this, too. The palette connects the building to its climate, to the warmth and humidity of Hanoi, to the earth tones of traditional Vietnamese buildings without becoming a costume or a nostalgia piece. It reads as contemporary without trying to distance itself from its own context, which is a balance a lot of architecture gets wrong in either direction.

What you take away from 100 Windows isn’t really about the windows, or at least not literally. It’s about the idea that a constraint, whether it’s a narrow plot, a shared family life, or a hundred openings that need to somehow feel cohesive, can become the source of design rather than the obstacle to it. The windows are a by-product of a layered system, not a stylistic decision made in isolation. That’s what earns it attention beyond the aesthetic.

Architecture like this tends to get filed under “interesting regional work” and not looked at as broadly as it deserves. But the conversation 100 Windows is having about density, family, and what a facade actually owes its inhabitants is one that any city grappling with urban housing should be paying attention to. It’s not proposing a universal solution. It’s doing something more useful: showing what happens when designers take the specific conditions of a place seriously enough to build something genuinely shaped by them. The result is a house that looks singular because it is.

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Vollebak Made a $3,995 Jacket for the End of the World

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Vollebak has never been the kind of brand that plays it safe. Since launching in 2016, the British label has built a reputation for making gear that reads more like science fiction than seasonal fashion. Their products come with essays instead of product descriptions, and their material choices lean toward graphene, solar-charged fibres, and military-grade composites. So when their latest release landed with an acronym for a name and a price tag that could cover a month’s rent in most cities, most of us weren’t entirely surprised. Just a little stunned.

FWAHBL stands for “For When All Hell Breaks Loose.” That’s the actual name. Not a placeholder, not a working title, not a wink-and-nod provocation. The brand looked at the current state of the world and decided the most honest thing they could do was name a jacket after it.

Designer: Vollebak

Only 10 of these exist. They’re priced at $3,995. They arrive in retro video game packaging alongside a comic book and a trailer for an upcoming game. The whole thing reads like a fever dream, and yet, once you look at what’s actually inside it, the jacket starts making a strange kind of sense.

The material comes from Fothergill, a British manufacturer that has been producing protective gear for the military since 1847. The fabric is double-faced polychloroprene rubber coated over a woven polyester core, built to resist oils, chemicals, flame, and extreme weather. This isn’t performance wear with a dramatic name slapped on it. The engineering is real, even if Vollebak is quick to clarify that it isn’t certified safety equipment. What it is, they say, is clothing designed for extreme weather and existential dread. I appreciate the specificity.

A jacket that could theoretically withstand a chemical spill but comes dressed for a gallery opening is a very particular kind of product. The hazard yellow finish makes it look like something you’d find on a nuclear site inspector who also happens to have excellent taste. It’s alarming and considered at the same time, which feels very intentional. Vollebak’s whole design language leans into that tension, the idea that what we wear should be able to meet us at our worst, not just our most polished.

The narrative wrapped around the jacket is what separates it from a typical limited-edition fashion drop. Vollebak didn’t just make a jacket and photograph it on a rooftop. They built a universe: the comic book, the video game, the worldbuilding. The jacket becomes almost secondary to the story it’s trying to tell, which is either a genius move or a complete overreach, depending on how you feel about brands constructing mythology around outerwear. Personally, I find it more compelling than a seasonal lookbook ever manages to be. At least it commits to a point of view.

The collectible angle is also hard to ignore. Ten pieces worldwide isn’t a production run. It’s closer to an art edition, which raises the question of who actually buys this. Probably not someone planning to commute in it. Most likely it’s the kind of person who understands that certain objects carry cultural weight beyond their function, the same kind of person who collects a Helmut Lang archive piece or a first-edition sneaker that never touches the ground. Whether we call that fashion, collecting, or very expensive storytelling, the outcome is the same.

Objects that sit at the intersection of design, utility, and narrative have always existed, from limited-run furniture to bespoke motorcycles to museum-acquired concept cars. The FWAHBL Jacket fits that lineage more comfortably than it fits any fashion calendar.

Whether or not you’d wear it, or could, the jacket asks a useful question. How much are we expecting from the things we put on our bodies? Vollebak’s answer has always been: more. More protection, more engineering, more intention. The FWAHBL Jacket takes that philosophy to its logical, slightly unhinged conclusion. A trench coat for the end of things, made by people who clearly hope you never actually need it.

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Smart Rings Finally Got a Reason to Exist Beyond Sleep Tracking

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The smart ring market has had a good run on heart rate and sleep tracking. Oura, Samsung Galaxy Ring, and their growing circle of competitors have made it genuinely useful to wear a small device on your finger all day. But if you’ve been waiting for wearable health tech to go deeper than pulse and REM cycles, engineers at UC San Diego may have just drawn the roadmap.

Their prototype, called CHARM (Continuous Health Analyzing Ring Module), doesn’t check your heart. It reads your sweat. Specifically, the microscopic amount of sweat that your fingers naturally produce throughout the day, no gym session required. Through a built-in osmotic hydrogel that draws moisture out passively, the ring collects and analyzes up to four chemical biomarkers at a time: glucose, ketones, vitamin C, uric acid, lactate, and alcohol. It then sends that data wirelessly to a smartphone.

Designer: UC San Diego engineers

That list of biomarkers is worth sitting with for a moment. Glucose and ketones tell you about your metabolic state and how your body is processing energy. Lactate relates to physical exertion and muscle activity. Uric acid is linked to inflammation and conditions like gout. Vitamin C reflects dietary intake. Alcohol levels speak for themselves. Getting any one of these readings from a non-invasive wearable is already impressive. Getting all of them simultaneously, continuously, and without drawing a single drop of blood, is something else entirely.

The research, published in Nature Communications and led by postdoctoral researcher Tamoghna Saha in the lab of Joseph Wang at UC San Diego, has already passed some important early tests. In trials with participants both with and without Type 1 diabetes, CHARM’s sweat-based glucose readings closely matched results from a standard continuous glucose monitor. Its ketone data similarly aligned with readings from a traditional blood meter. For a prototype, that’s a meaningful validation and a strong signal that the underlying science holds up outside of a lab setting.

What makes this feel like a genuine step forward, rather than just another research headline, is how clearly it names the gap in current wearable technology. As Saha put it, commercial rings only provide biophysical information but lack the molecular data that offers deeper insights into an individual’s health. That is a polite way of saying that knowing your resting heart rate is useful, but it doesn’t tell you whether you’re running low on vitamin C or how your body actually responded to what you ate for lunch.

The design challenge here is real, and I think it deserves more credit than the flashier headline about sweat gets it. Cramming accurate chemical sensors, a hydrogel layer, data processing, and wireless connectivity into a ring-shaped form factor is not a small engineering problem. The current prototype, which clamps around a finger, is still a long way from the slim, polished bands we’ve grown used to slipping on without thinking. Getting it there, while keeping the sensor accuracy intact and the battery life practical, will be the hard part. But that is exactly the kind of design and miniaturization problem that tends to get solved once the underlying science is proven. The history of consumer health tech is basically a series of “we figured out the science, now let’s make it wearable” moments.

The smart ring category has felt a little flat lately, if I’m being direct. The differences between most devices come down to software features and companion app design, not any fundamental leap in what they can actually detect. CHARM points toward a version of the smart ring that is genuinely measuring your body’s chemistry in real time, the kind of data that has historically required a clinic visit or a prescription-grade device. Putting that on a finger, passively, all day, changes what personal health monitoring can realistically mean.

It’s still early. CHARM is a prototype, the paper is fresh, and a consumer version is nowhere near announced. But the direction is right, and the science backs it up. If biochemical monitoring eventually becomes a standard feature of smart rings rather than a research novelty, this prototype will be one of the moments worth pointing back to.

The post Smart Rings Finally Got a Reason to Exist Beyond Sleep Tracking first appeared on Yanko Design.

A BB Pod-Shaped CD Player Straight Out of Death Stranding

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When Kojima Productions does something, it rarely feels like a simple product release. It feels like a statement. The new Instant Disc Audio Cp1 DEATH STRANDING 2 Model, a limited-edition wireless CD player made in official collaboration with Japanese audio brand km5, is proof of exactly that. It dropped on August 1, 2026, and it may be the most thoughtfully designed piece of gaming merchandise I’ve seen in years.

If you’ve played Death Stranding, you already know what a BB Pod is. If you haven’t, here’s the short version. BB stands for Bridge Baby, a term for an unborn infant kept alive inside a transparent life-support unit called a Pod, which serves as a supernatural navigation tool in the game’s hauntingly quiet, post-apocalyptic world. The Pod is one of Death Stranding’s most memorable visual symbols: eerie, delicate, and somehow deeply moving, a small glowing capsule that you cradle, protect, and come to care about over the course of the game. Turning that object into a CD player is either a stroke of genius or complete madness. I’m going with genius.

Designer: Kojima Productions x km5

The design is where this whole thing earns its price tag. The Cp1 features a translucent orange shell, and that’s not just for aesthetics. It lets you actually watch the disc spin and the internal mechanics move in real time. As someone who grew up watching cassette tapes wind through their spools, that level of visible mechanical action hits a very specific nostalgic nerve. The translucency echoes the BB Pod’s gel-filled, see-through casing, and it works so well that it almost feels like the CD player was always meant to look this way. It didn’t need Death Stranding to be beautiful, but the collaboration gave it a context that makes it feel intentional rather than just decorative.

The base Cp1 by km5 isn’t a new product. It’s been around for a while as a compact, Bluetooth-enabled CD player with a Nixie tube-style LED display and a wall-mount option that honestly makes it look more like modern furniture than consumer electronics. The Death Stranding 2 model takes that foundation and pushes it into collector territory. Priced at 25,300 yen, around $160, it connects via Bluetooth 5.3, runs for approximately 7 to 8 hours on a single charge, and notably doesn’t come with a built-in speaker. You’re meant to pair it with your own headphones or external audio setup, which keeps the device compact, sculptural, and true to its aesthetic. It’s not trying to be a Bluetooth boombox. It’s something much quieter and more considered than that.

The fact that this exists at all says something interesting about where we are with physical media right now. CD sales have been quietly climbing again, especially among younger audiences who want a more intentional, tactile way to listen to music. Vinyl gets most of the headlines, but CDs are genuinely having their own moment, and a device like this taps right into that energy. It gives you a reason to care about the format all over again, not just as a nostalgia trip, but as an object worth owning and displaying on a shelf next to your records.

The timing works in its favor, too. Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launched earlier this year and carries forward everything the first game did best: gorgeous world-building, deeply strange storytelling, and a visual identity unlike anything else in gaming. Releasing this CD player alongside that cultural wave makes it feel like part of something larger, not a cash grab bolted onto a recognizable franchise. km5 and Kojima Productions clearly put thought into this, and the result reflects that. This isn’t just a piece of merch. It’s a collaboration that understood its source material well enough to let the design carry the story.

The Instant Disc Audio Cp1 DEATH STRANDING 2 Model is available directly through km5’s official website and at the KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS × PARCO GAMES STRAND STORE in Shibuya PARCO. Stock is limited, and if history tells us anything about Kojima collaborations, waiting around is usually the fastest way to miss out entirely.

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London’s Barbican Now Has Furniture You’re Allowed to Move

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Most public spaces don’t trust you. They’re designed to move you through them efficiently, seat you for a limited time, or keep you from lingering too long. Benches with armrests in the middle to prevent sleeping. Spikes on flat ledges. Gaps between seats so no one gets too comfortable. Somewhere along the way, cities stopped being places you inhabit and started being places you pass through.

Päivi Raivio’s Basic Forms (of Urban Life) is a direct and cheerful argument against all of that. The Finnish artist and urban designer has taken a set of geometric plywood pieces, painted in colors borrowed from the Barbican’s own brutalist architecture, and placed them in the middle of one of London’s most famous cultural complexes. No instructions. No fixed configuration. No single correct answer. Visitors are invited to pick them up, move them around, stack them, sit on them, or arrange them into something entirely new. What looks like furniture is actually a question: what do you want this space to be?

Designer: Päivi Raivio

I’ve seen a lot of participatory design installations over the years, and most of them fail for the same reason: they participate for you. They have a predetermined “correct” arrangement that visitors slowly discover through guided cues. There’s no real agency. Raivio’s work is different because it genuinely means it. A seat can become a table. A table can become a platform. A platform can become a wall, a stage, or a privacy screen between two strangers who both needed a quiet corner at the same moment. The work shifts with whoever is using it, and that feels radical compared to what most public design offers.

The Barbican is a fitting backdrop for all of this. Designed through the 1950s and completed in 1982, it’s one of the most monumental pieces of brutalist architecture in the UK, all exposed concrete and sharp geometry. Raivio’s lightweight, colorful pieces don’t fight the setting. They echo it quietly, picking up the shapes and tones of the architecture without trying to compete with several acres of concrete. The contrast between the fixed permanence of the building and the cheerful rearrangeability of the installation is part of what makes the whole thing click.

For Raivio, play isn’t a decorative layer applied over the surface of serious design. It’s a foundational principle. Her studio, RaivioBumann, focuses on transforming public spaces into places that are genuinely livable, not just functional. The idea that disorder and disruption can be design tools, rather than problems to be solved, runs through everything about Basic Forms. Public space, in her view, is most alive when it hasn’t been entirely decided for you.

The installation is part of the Barbican’s Play Make Do festival, running 14 to 16 August 2026, and it’s free, unticketed, and open to anyone who walks through. It previously showed at Concéntrico in Logroño, Spain, where it was met with the kind of spontaneous collective enthusiasm that designers spend careers hoping for. People of all ages rearranged, combined, balanced, and rebuilt the pieces for hours. The images from that presentation are worth looking up. They show something you don’t see often enough in public space: strangers making decisions together.

That’s the detail that sticks with me. Not the form, not the color palette, not even the clever way the installation adapts to its environment. It’s the fact that two people who don’t know each other will naturally start negotiating, collaborating, and eventually laughing over how to arrange a pile of plywood. Raivio has essentially built a permission slip for connection, disguised as furniture.

Cities don’t lack benches or tables. They lack reasons to linger. They lack spaces that say, figure it out, make it yours, stay as long as you want. Basic Forms gives London exactly that, even if only for a weekend. The real question it raises is why we aren’t building this kind of thinking into cities permanently, instead of treating it as a festival-season novelty.

The post London’s Barbican Now Has Furniture You’re Allowed to Move first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Hidden Part of Every Book Just Became a Sculpture

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Every book you have ever held has a secret. Not a story buried between its pages, but a structural one, a quiet piece of craftsmanship stitched along the spine that most people never think to look for. A new work by Singaporean artist Adelene Koh not only knows about it. It makes it the entire point.

“Endless” (2025) is a large, ring-like sculpture built from paper, embroidery threads, and aluminum wire. It is meditative in form, circular in structure, and resembles a torus. It is also, depending on how much you know about bookbinding, either immediately legible or completely mysterious. Either way, it stops you. The scale of it, the density of color, the almost compulsive repetition of its construction, all of it registers before you even begin to understand what you are looking at.

Designer: Adelene Koh

What you are looking at is an endband. Or rather, what an endband becomes when it is freed from the book it was always meant to serve. If you have never heard that word, you are in good company. The endband is a structural and decorative element sewn along the head and tail of a book’s spine, a strip of colored thread that adds reinforcement and a quiet finishing touch. It is the part that usually disappears the moment a cover is glued on. Most readers never see it. Most of us never think to ask what is actually holding a book together. “Endless” takes that hidden element and builds an entire object around it, blowing the endband up into something that can finally be seen on its own terms.

The construction method is as considered as the concept. Koh used the front bead method, an 18th and 19th century English sewing technique, worked around a single aluminum wire core. Into that structure she integrated hand-folded and hand-cut pages formed into quires, with additional folds along the fore-edge. The result is not just visually striking but physically demanding to comprehend. The labor embedded in the piece is immense, and the closer you look, the more apparent that becomes. It is the kind of object that rewards slowness and punishes a quick glance.

The material choice deserves its own attention. Paper is usually the fragile thing in the room, the thing that tears, yellows, and eventually dissolves. Here, it becomes the structural backbone. It holds the entire form in place. That inversion feels intentional, a kind of material optimism that refuses to accept the obvious hierarchy between what is precious and what is expendable. Thread, wire, and paper, three materials associated with impermanence, come together to produce something that feels permanent and resolved.

“Endless” was shortlisted for the 2026 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, one of the more prestigious recognitions in contemporary craftsmanship, and the piece carries the weight of that context well. The prize consistently spotlights work that sits at the intersection of tradition and innovation, and this fits squarely in that space. It is technically rooted in centuries-old bookbinding practice while producing something that looks entirely contemporary. That balance is genuinely difficult to achieve, and rarer than it should be.

I keep thinking about what the design is actually arguing. We tend to celebrate the surface of things: the cover, the finish, the outer form. The integrity of any well-made object usually lives in the parts nobody shows you. “Endless” makes that invisible infrastructure visible, and in doing so, asks a quiet but pointed question about what we choose to hide and what we choose to show.

The 2026 prize was ultimately awarded to South Korean artist Jongjin Park for “Strata of Illusion,” selected by a jury that included architect Frida Escobedo, designer Patricia Urquiola, and curator Abraham Thomas. But the shortlist carries its own weight, and the presence of “Endless” on it feels like a signal worth paying attention to. Bookbinding rarely gets the cultural spotlight it deserves. As a design object, “Endless” makes the strongest possible case for why it should.

The post The Hidden Part of Every Book Just Became a Sculpture first appeared on Yanko Design.